5 Things You Didn't Know About Grandparents

Given that it's spring break season and many of us are going off to visit your parents or traveling with them seemed a timely season for highlighting some factoids from a new report on grandparenting from the Met Life Mature Market Institute:

One in four Americans is a grandparent.

There are more American grandparents than there are people in the United Kingdom…twice the size of the Canadian population and three times Australia's!

Average age an American becomes a grandparent today: 48. (So much for those fluffy-headed-granny-in-a-rocker cliches!) (Though my parents were in their 70s when first grandchild was born!)

Grandparents spend $50 billion on grandchildren…one of every four toys, four of every 10 children's books. (You seeing evidence of that?)

Al Gore, Goldie Hawn, Harrison Ford, Priscilla Presley, the two living Beatles, and four Rolling Stones are grandparents.